Days of Infamy

in·fa·my

ˈinfəmē/

noun

1. the state of being well known for some bad quality or deed.

   "a day that will live in infamy"

   synonyms:

   notoriety, disrepute, ill fame, disgrace, discredit, shame, dishonor,ignominy, scandal, censure, blame, disapprobation, condemnation More

   • an evil or wicked act.

     "one of history's greatest infamies"

December 7, 1941

While President Roosevelt's words, a date which will live in infamy, are well known the world over, I should like to suggest that there are quite a few days of infamy in history. Here are just a few recent ones:

September 11, 2001

April 19, 1995

July 11, 1995

April 6, 1994 

April 19, 1993

August 9, 1945

August 6, 1945

These are just a few days of infamy over the past 73 years. Throughout human history there have been many, many more. 

On this Second Sunday of Advent, let us look forward to a time when there will be no more days of infamy to add to the list.

Too Bad It's Monday (Humor, Jokes, and KATZ)

A doctor was addressing a large audience in Tampa.

'The material we put into our stomachs is enough to have killed most of us sitting here, years ago.

Red meat is awful. Soft drinks corrode your stomach lining. Chinese food is loaded with MSG.

High fat diets can be disastrous, and none of us realizes the long-term harm caused by the germs in our drinking water. However, there is one thing that is the most dangerous of all and we all have eaten, or will eat it. Can anyone here tell me what food it is that causes the most grief and suffering for years after eating it?'

After several seconds of quiet, a 75-year-old man in the front row raised his hand, and softly said, "Wedding Cake."

When the waitress in a New York City restaurant brought him the soup du jour, the Englishman was a bit dismayed.

"Good heavens," he said, "what is this?"

"Why, it's bean soup," she replied.

"I don't care where it's been," he replied. "What is it now?"

A conductor was having a lot of trouble with a drummer.

He constantly gave this guy personal attention and much advice, but his performance simply didn't improve.

Finally, before the whole orchestra, he took a critical jab at the drummer, "When a musician just can't handle his instrument and doesn't improve when given help, they take away the instrument, give him two sticks, and make him a drummer, which must be why you play the drums."

A stage whisper was heard from the percussion section, "And if he can't handle even that, they take away one of his sticks and make him a conductor."

Take 1:

Field Marshal Sam Bahadur Maneckshaw once started addressing a public meeting at Ahmedabad in English. The crowd started chanting,

"Speak in Gujarati. We will hear you only if you speak in Gujarati." Field Marshal Sam Bahadur Maneckshaw stopped. Swept the audience with a hard stare and replied,

"Friends, I have fought many a battle in my long career. I have learned Punjabi from men of the Sikh Regiment; Marathi from the Maratha Regiment; Tamil from the men of the Madras Sappers; Bengali from the men of the Bengal Sappers, Hindi from the Bihar Regiment; and even Nepali from the Gurkha Regiment. 

Unfortunately, there was no soldier from Gujarat from whom I could have learned Gujarati"

You could have heard a pin drop

------------------------------------------------------------

Take 2:

JFK'S Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was in France in the early 60's when Charles DeGaule, the French President, decided to pull out of NATO. DeGaule said he wanted all US military out of France as soon as possible. Rusk responded, "does that include the 180,000 who are buried here ?" DeGaule could not respond.

You could have heard a pin drop 

------------------------------------------------------------

Take 3:

Robert Whiting, an elderly US gentleman of 83, arrived in Paris by plane. 

At French Customs, he took a few minutes to locate his passport in his carry on.

"You have been to France before, Monsieur?" , the Customs officer asked sarcastically.

Mr. Whiting admitted that he had been to France previously.

"Then you should know enough to have your passport ready." 

The American said, The last time I was here, I didn't have to show it."

"Impossible. Americans always have to show their passports on arrival in France !" , the Customs officer sneered.

The American senior gave the Frenchman a long, hard look.Then he quietly explained...

"Well, when I came ashore at Omaha Beach, at 4:40am, on D-Day in 1944, to help liberate your country, I couldn't find a single Frenchman to show a passport to.." 

You could have heard a pin drop.

An elderly man went to the college that he went to when he was a youth.

He knocked on room number 3 of the hostel and said: "May I come in. I lived in this very room thirty years ago when I studied in this college."

A young man opened the door and let him in. The old man examined the room, fondly remembering everything.

He said, "The same old room, the same old wooden table, the ventilator and the same old window that opens to the garden. And the same old bed."

When examining it he found a young girl under the bed.

The young man got alarmed and said, "Don't mistake me. She is my cousin. She dropped her earring and is searching for it." 

The old man said, "And the same old story!!

Two guys went duck hunting. One drank a bottle and a half of whisky while the other kept watch.

After two hours, a solitary duck flew up. The sober man took aim but missed.

"Quick," he said to his drunken friend, "try and hit that duck."

The drunk waved his shotgun in the vague direction of the sky, pulled the trigger and hit the duck.

"That's amazing," said the sober one.

"Not really," replied the drunk. "When there's a whole flock you can hardly miss!"

A blonde went into a pet shop and asked the owner if he had any parrots.

The owner replied, "Sorry, I don't have any at the moment."

"Damn and blast!" said the blonde, "I have been invited to a fancy dress party for the first time in my life and I want to go as a Pirate, and I have been told to be as authentic as possible, hence the need for the parrot," explained the Blonde.

"Well," said the owner, "if you come back here next week, specifically on Thursday, I am expecting a shipment from South America and I'll be able to supply you with a parrot, guaranteed."

"Damn and blast!" said the blonde, "I can't come on that day or for some time after."

"Why not?" Asked the owner.

"Because that is the day I'm having my leg amputated!"

KATZ

Peace: Be Not Afraid

Peace is the theme of today, the Second Sunday of Advent. 


Many years ago I thought of the Peace of Advent as being related to Pax Britannica or Pax Romana: a time of wide-ranging stability when there was only a single dominant power.However, in time I came to understand that the Peace celebrated on the Second Sunday of Advent encompasses much more than the absence or war or even a time of stability. The Peace of the Second Sunday of Advent refers to God's Peace. 

Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. ~ Philippians 4:6-7

 
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. ~ John 14:27

The Iconoclastic God

I want to suggest that Christmas is all about God as iconoclast, all about turning this world upside-down. And we don’t like it. We struggle against it.

Through the years I have posted several sermons on Nick's Bytes. Almost all have been written by me, although often I have not told you that the post began as a sermon. (I come to learn tha some people are really turned off my the word).

Today, on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, I want to share with you a sermon written by someone else: the Reverend Doug Fowler, pastor of my home congregation, Salem United Church of Christ in Louisville, Kentucky. This sermon is very contemporary; as a matter of fact, Doug is in the pulpit at Salem preaching it today.

Doug's sermon is much more than contemporary: it speaks of the God in whom I believe and serve. This God is not content with the status quo, especially when the status quo tolerates and may even promote injustice, intolerance, oppression, hatred, and brutality. This is a God who does the unexpected, even when folks believe that the status quo (the expected) is God's will.

Enough of my words! Please take just a moment to read and hear Doug's words:

Micah 5:2-5a

But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah,
   who are one of the little clans of Judah,
from you shall come forth for me
   one who is to rule in Israel,
whose origin is from of old,
   from ancient days.
Therefore he shall give them up until the time
   when she who is in labor has brought forth;
then the rest of his kindred shall return
   to the people of Israel.
And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord,
   in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.
And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great
   to the ends of the earth;
and he shall be the one of peace. 

Luke 1:46b-55

[And Mary said,] “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” 

In the 15^th century of the Common Era, there were plenty of folks around who felt that this world needed some serious repentance, some heavy duty reforming, and some figured that needed to start with the two most powerful and biggest institutions/organizations in town—the government (kings) and the Church (Pope). Both Church and government wanted to blame the other for virtually everything that went wrong, to the extent that either admitted that anything was wrong—and not much has changed since.

In the period known as the Reformation, our own ecclesiastical forebears were of two types: those who wanted to keep some forms—stained glass, ancient language, vestments, clergy—and those who wanted to start church over from scratch. Interestingly, most of the players on both sides of the argument were inside the Church already, making it an in-house squabble, like Martin Luther on the one side and Ulrich Zwingli on the other. In short, these are all good persons with good ideas, but they couldn’t figure out how to reconcile them. The established Church wanted to—still wants—keep things as they are. One the other side were—are—iconoclasts, or image-breakers, who attack the traditional images or ideas or institutions with ideas for revising them or creating new ones. The ancestors of this congregation would have been among the iconoclasts—as would the Pilgrims and Baptists and a variety of other religious expressions. The hard part of all that is that keeping up with iconoclasm is not easy, requires constant creativity and willingness to abandon ideas or projects in which folks have been heavily invested.

I want to suggest that Christmas is all about God as iconoclast, all about turning this world upside-down. And we don’t like it. We’ll struggle against it. Let me explain.

About 2800 years ago, Palestine was suffering from oppressive neighbors—much like today. The prophet Micah said to his countrymen that this too would pass, that they would know better days. He told them to remember King David and look for someone like that to come and make them whole. The major clue was that this new David would come from Bethlehem, the most backwater and rinky-dink town in the land. This nothing-place would be the source of messiah, God’s granted one. See how the story is going? Well, when we look for messiahs in our time, where do we look? Our iconic image is Abraham Lincoln in a log cabin in Hodgenville. God’s anointed one comes from an unlikely place that turns everything upside-down. We think can any good athlete come out of a fifth-rate school? Can any good physician come out of that hospital? Can any good statesman come out of that country? Well, God says that God’s leaders, messiah, will spring from the least likely of sources, and it will be God’s choice. When we look for messiah, we need to look in unlikely places and at unlikely times. What’s why we need to be alert, lest we get caught looking the wrong way or at the wrong place. God turns things upside-down. Christmas is a time of turning upside-down. Make no mistake: when the prophet tells us all to repent, it’s about turning things upside-down.

Revolutions are about turning things upside-down. God is doing a revolutionary thing with Christmas. Luke tells us that Mary sang with her relative Elizabeth. This is a song that has been banned by some governments that take the Bible more seriously than our own because it is revolutionary; it is about turning things upside down. It’s a transcript of resistance by an oppressed people that looks for God to turn that oppression upside down. The Magnificat is politically dangerous, and over history political authorities have worried that it might incite oppressed people to riot. So, they interpret it in different ways.

Like all prayers, Mary’s song begins with praise and gratitude, and then goes on to note how God turns kings and nations topsy-turvy. Herod would have been a case in point, named by the Romans the “King of the Jews”. People like Mary were the ones who paid for the schemes hatched by Herod, who was hated in part because hew as Jewish and working against his own people! He knew how the people felt, so he imprisoned 70 Jewish elders with instructions that they were to be executed the day Herod died so there would be some mourning in the land. Human rights would be a foreign concept in ancient Palestine.

Messiah, to at least some in Palestine, meant relief from the power of the government. The coming of Jesus was the foundation of desperate hope, and Mary, the pregnant teenaged child-woman, sang about it. Mary sings about God reversing everything, turning everything upside-down: who’s in will now be out, who’s up will now be down, the winners will be the losers. The world of conventional wisdom says that blessed or happy are the beautiful, happy are the successful, happy are the powerful, happy are the secure, happy is Herod. But the Magnificat says all that will be reversed with Messiah. And a few years later, a rabbi came along who told whoever would listen:”Blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry, blessed at the meek.” No wonder folks got upset with messiah, and even today would rather turn to a prosperity gospel!

The rabbi, called Jesus, couldn’t overthrow Herod by using Herod’s methods though. Using terror to get rid of terror won’t work, he said. He couldn’t out-Herod Herod. What Messiah could do is out-love Herod and defeat Herod’s capacity to hate by his greater capacity to suffer and love. He would humble himself—be born in a barn to unwed parents in an unconventional family, grow up in poverty, work with his hands. He would teach wherever people would listen. He would be accused unfairly, tried corruptly, and mocked. He would be executed. No wonder our worlds have a hard tome with all this. No wonder our worlds want to turn it down and around, water it down, make it slide down easily.

This story of Christmas is amazing in how much it turns things over, and we make it all so sweet as to take the bite out of it. The story has Mary singing the same song that Hannah sang at the birth of Samuel, her first-born whom she was giving up for adoption by the Temple cult. In a way, both women are losing their children. Samuel would be the priest who spoke with God on behalf of God’s people and who worked hard to get the people to be righteous, a forerunner of King David. And Jesus Messiah would come out of the last likely of places, and he would remake the world. And Mary’s pregnancy, like that of Elizabeth, would be unlikely; Messiah comes to us in unlikely ways. This would strike speechless Elizabeth’s husband, the Rev. Zechariah. Messiah does that—which helps me dismiss plenty of loud-mouthed preachers. We need to be looking for arrival of Messiah in the least likely places: poor women, bush league towns, the naïve and the undeveloped, above all, the powerless. Messiah will come out of nowhere—and we’re too likely to be looking another way.

I don’t believe that we’ve ever had a Messiah the equal of Jesus. I do believe there have been others sent by God to turn things upside-down after the fashion of Jesus, and I do believe that we look for more of those. In the meantime, we practice what we know.

For example, I think that Mohandas Gandhi is a Messiah, an anointed one. He came out of nowhere, was not highly thought of, was “despised and rejected of people”. He came out of a detested minority in South Africa, he was dishonored in his lifetime, he was assassinated. But he turned the world upside-down. After him the British Empire had to free India. After him, the “coloreds” of South Africa took more control of their lives. After him, there was a viable program for fighting oppressive regimes without using violence. Notice that he wasn’t even Christian, though he did teach some very fine lessons to Christians.

Another example is Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in this country. You may remember better than I how things were in the days of Jim Crow around here. Dr. King let the oppressive forces beat him, badmouth him, jail him, insult him, murder him. The result was an overturn of society. Jim Crow was turned upside-down. I believe that was a messianic moment, because it was really all about people having abundant life, about oppression being lifted, about society being transformed and by someone who came out of nowhere, and was not part of the elite and acted in a peaceable manner.

A different kind of messianic figure, for me, is Jean Vanier. His father was the King’s representative, the Governor-General of Canada, his brother was a monsignor in Montreal, and hew as an artillery officer in the Royal Nave in World War II. We’re talking about a high-power family here. After the war, Vanier studied at the Sorbonne for a doctorate. A priest there took him to a suburb of Paris where he met, providentially, two young men who were institutionalized because they were too mentally handicapped to live on their own. They asked him a question of justice: why do you live in this big house all alone when we must be crowded into that crummy institution? How come you have good food and we don’t? Why do you have some meaning to your life and we just go day to day? Vanier’s answer to them was to take them into his house and they would live together and the rules that governed their lives would be the Sermon on the Mount. Thus began L’Arche (“the Ark” from the Biblical story of a refuge from the storm.) which now has about 100 communities around the world. My point is that Jean Vanier turned everything upside down—he was rich and became poor for them, and they who were poor became rich. Christmas is all about turning everything upside-down, about the rejects going to the head of the line, the oppressed being set free. That’s messianic.

One more messianic example that comes to my mind is Millard Fuller. He was working his way through school—so silver spoons for him—and he made out just fine, except that his life felt empty. The things of this world don’t always satisfy, but what wonderful things have you ever heard come out of Alabama? Fuller took a rest at a community in Georgia to clear his mind. What he learned there was that God’s plan for creation is not destruction and pain, but wholeness. His motto became “No More Shacks” and he put his talents to work organizing a non-governmental, biblically-based program that provides decent housing for all God’s children. He started the program in Africa and it has spread around the world. We know it as Habitat for Humanity. It turns housing upside-down. It works too: its default rate in mortgages is minimal—and people get decent housing and, with it, some degree of self-respect. That’s, I think, messianic.

I want to tell you about Paul Farmer too, but there’s not time.

Now, I hasten to add that no messianic figure since Jesus has measured up to him for righteousness and holiness and purity. None that I know of has ever claimed to do so. What they have all done is turned this world upside down, have let the oppressed go free, turned this world around. Messianic figures—there could be some in this very congregation—in any age, to greater or lesser degrees long for a time when all suffering will end and everyone will have enough, when nations and families will live in peace, and the earth will be restored and healed of the damage that has been done. It’s a vision of the future—which simply means that we’re not finished yet; we have more work to do. Mary had the nerve and the imagination to claim such futures for herself and for her people. What’s passed along to us is the challenge to do no less.

May that be truth for us for the living of these days. Amen.